The official opening of the COP29 climate summit kicked off in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan today. And so begins the two-week long shindig of private jet-flying elites lecturing us all on how terrible we’re all doing when it comes to planetary warming.
UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell started things off with an impassioned plea for “urgent, global cooperation” on climate change.
“We mustn’t let 1.5 slip out of reach. Even as temperatures rise, the implementation of our agreements must claw them back,” said Stiell.
“Clean energy and infrastructure investment will reach two trillion dollars in 2024. Almost twice that of fossil fuels. The shift to clean-energy and climate-resilience will not be stopped. Our job is to accelerate this and make sure its huge benefits are shared by all countries and all people.”
Our own Environment Minister and Green champion, Eamon Ryan, is to fly the flag for Ireland as one of the lead negotiators at the conference of the United Nations, and is set to arrive on Tuesday. He will be joined by other eco warriors, including the UK’s Ed Miliband, who has pledged to decarbonise electricity by 2030.
One can’t help thinking, though, if Mr Ryan, Miliband and others were serious about setting an example when it comes to reducing our hefty carbon footprint, they’d probably forgo the 6,000 mile round trip to Azerbaijan. In a world run by Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams calls, it just seems like more hot air in action. It’s a flight time of over 6 hours one way from Dublin, and around 1.6 tonnes of CO2e. I apologise if “let them eat cake” springs to mind.
The event has 66,778 registered attendees, the vast majority of whom have flown or used other fossil-fuelled transport to get there. Once the big players arrive on their private jets, they will engage in days packed full of lecturing and demanding billions of others to reduce their carbon footprint.
They will tell us that the primary fight facing millions of people battling high grocery and electricity bills is actually about the climate. That we all must be kept awake at night by existential terror over our “collective suicide” (to use the words of Charles Michel, President of the European Council, from today). The irony, surely, cannot be lost on us.
Joe Biden will not attend, but rest assured the US has sent a team of delegates who are already scrambling to compensate after Donald Trump’s crushing win last week. US climate envoy, John Podesta, urged governments to hold on to faith in America’s promise to tackle global warming – claiming Mr Trump can “slow, not stop” the transition from fossil fuels to green energy when he returns to office in January in one of the biggest political comebacks ever seen. No doubt many delegates in Azerbaijan right now are shuddering and panicking in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s re-election.
Over the best part of the last week, we’ve seen how hard Donald Trump’s victory in the US has been not only for Kamala Harris’s campaign staff, along with the Beyonce’s and Cardi B’s, but also for much of the Irish media and political class. Climate activists, too, have crumpled in floods of despair. Spare a thought too for our own Green coalition government, whose plans, in the wake of Trump’s victory, look even more ludicrous.
After all, Mr Trump was elected, winning the popular vote and all seven swing states, after promising to end “Kamala’s war on American energy.” He won on a ticket promising to boost fossil-fuel production, and in his victory speech, boasted about the US’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas.
“We have more liquid gold than any country in the world. More than Saudi Arabia. We have more than Russia. Bobby, stay away from the liquid gold,” Trump joked, while joined onstage by former environmental lawyer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, early on Wednesday morning. Trump has promised people that his energy policies will bring down prices. He has pledged to terminate the Green New Deal – which Kamala Harris, as VP, signed up to as a co-sponsor.
“We’re going to terminate the Green New Scam. It’s a scam,” Trump told ralliers.
Speaking ahead of the election, he told one rally: “We took almost ten trillion dollars for nonsense, for absolute nonsense. We’ll do bridges, we’ll do roads, we’ll do things that we need. But we’re not going to be spending it or wasting it stupidly, and have China laugh at us. In the meantime, they’re building a coal plant every week.”
And for all the times we’re told he is an idiot, he had a point. China remains the world’s largest polluter, yet accounts for a quarter of worldwide investment into renewable energy. It accounted for nearly 31 per cent of all global emissions of CO2 in 2022.
But it has consistently dodged having to pay for damage. In the same year, Chinese companies produced more than three-quarters of the world’s solar panels, and manufactured three quarters of all lithium-ion batteries needed to power electric cars.
In the next ten years, Chinese companies are on track to own half of all the lithium-ion battery factories in Europe. In other words, it’s a gravy train. And Trump knows it. It’s clear that China will never sacrifice economic growth in the name of climate – so why are the rest of us so eager to do so?
Trump has also honed in on Germany in campaign speeches. After scraping nuclear reactors, Berlin announced it would spend billions on new gas power plants at the start of this year. A fossil fuel expansion would be needed to ensure long-term energy security, industry experts and government leaders said.
“Their whole government crashed,” Trump said in the same speech, adding that he heard the country was building “two coal plants a week.”
“Their new government is building coal plants all over the place. They’re building brand new coal plants, nuclear plants, and other things, because Germany was going to fail. So why are we following these countries that tried it and failed? And they’re smart countries.
“They tried it – they failed. Why are we doing this? Why aren’t we creating great energy plants, great sources of energy, instead of playing this game with wind that is ruining everything, killing all your birds, destroying the fields, all these gorgeous fields?” the would be president-elect said to nodding heads. “It’s a green scam, it’s a shame.”
He went on: “Look, I’m all for clean energy – I want clean water, I want clean air, but you can’t destroy your country over it. I’m a big fan of solar but it can’t fire up plants. It’s not going to fire up plants. Fire up those plants. We’ve got to get them going, and the only thing that can do that [right now] is fossil fuel. The only thing that can make electricity, which we all want, right now, is fossil fuel and nuclear.”
Trump’s policy of US energy self-sufficiency stands in stark contrast to the energy crunch facing Ireland. Because of the direction of our own leaders, we are now facing billions of euros of fines for not meeting totally unrealistic energy targets which they signed us up to. Reports have consistently highlighted how difficult and expensive reaching such targets would be, but the alarm sounded on deaf ears. Our leaders want to engage in virtue signalling, not realism.
Unlike Trump’s America, it looks like we are willing to destroy our country over clean energy while other nations sit comfortably doing nothing. The legally binding targets our government signed up to cannot be achieved, and will cost the taxpayer dearly.
As for COP29 itself, there are other clearly problematic aspects, including the choice of host country. There is no doubt most of the Irish media will get onboard like clapping seals. But the sheer hypocrisy of Azerbaijan hosting this jamboree of elites while actively expanding its fossil fuel empire and jailing rebel voices trying to expose its corruption is clear to see. Scores of apparently fake social media accounts are boosting Azerbaijan’s hosting of the Cop29 climate summit, an investigation, reported in the Guardian of all places, revealed.
“The accounts were mostly set up after July, at which time seven of the top 10 most engaged posts using the hashtags #COP29 and #COP29Azerbaijan were critical of Azerbaijan’s role in the conflict with Armenia, using hashtags such as #stopgreenwashgenocide. By September this had changed, with all of the top 10 most engaged posts coming from the official Cop29 Azerbaijan Account,” the paper reports.
Global Witness, which carried out the analysis, said artificially inflating the reach of government posts was drowning out independent criticism of the country’s record on repressing human rights. Azerbaijan – a peaceful environmental champion leading the way, or a known suppressor of rights for its own political ends?
And there’s the fact that the Taliban has confirmed that it is set to join the talks – proof, if any more proof was needed for the naysayers, that the whole thing is an almighty charade.